If 2018 was already a bad year for the GRU, on October 4th, different Western countries gave the final touch to the Service by publishing information about their operations and agents: it is the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Canada and the United States – and immediately Australia and New Zealand, as is normal, supported their allies. Summarizing: Holland and FVEY finish off the annus horribilis of the Service, as we will see in this post.
Holland
On October 4th, the Dutch military intelligence, the MIVD (Militaire Inlichtingen- en Veiligheidsdienst) published in a press conference ([1]) the operation carried out in April in which four GRU members were identified and expelled from the country on charges of attacking the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW); as the US Department of Justice did in July, it provides a wealth of detail about the identities, techniques, security measures, objectives … of GRU agents operating on Dutch soil with diplomatic passports. According to this information, four agents of the Service (two assigned to Unit 26165, Aleksei SERGEYEVICH MORENETS and Evgenii MIKHAYLOVICH SEREBRIAKOV, and two possibly assigned to Unit 22177, Alexey VALEREVICH MININ and Oleg MIKHAYLOVICH SOTNIKOV) land on April 10 in the Netherlands and are received by staff from the Russian Embassy in this country, they rent a car and execute a close access operation to try to compromise the security of the OPCW. They are identified, money is seized in cash and technical equipment (which of course is analyzed in detail, showing data from other operations) that includes devices to attack wireless networks and are accompanied to an Aeroflot plane that returns them to Russia. In the face of serious Dutch accusations, Russia defends that its agents simply conducted a security inspection at the country’s embassy in the Netherlands. [Read more…]